This blog has been quiet for a while, but that does not mean the writing has stopped. Here’s a link to my first print publication with the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law, entitled,The “Lone Grid” State: Texas as the Ideal Location for State-Level Climate Regulation(pdf).In short, I argue that the interaction between the interstate electrical grid and the Constitution’s limitation on state regulation of interstate commerce may actually make Texas better able to enact a strong climate program than even California. Enjoy!

Concerned neighbors who might otherwise be Tea Party activists are becoming eco-activists, organizing their neighbors, distributing flyers, and holding meetings with environmental groups such as the Sierra Club. Environmental organizers have been surprised by their reception in East Texas, where local support has blossomed from unexpected meeting attendance to letter-writing campaigns and community resistance councils.

Rural Texas does not normally ally itself with the Sierra Club, so what sets this pipeline apart from those that already snake across the Lone Star State? It is the heavy-handed tactics TransCanada is employing to blaze its oily trail through America. And especially in Texas, such strong-arming from a Canadian company—with major Chinese investors—feels a lot like foreign aggression.

Kim Feil, a concerned resident who lives in this threatened neighborhood, told Change.org about her work fighting drilling around her home. “This has been my full time, volunteer job since this summer. I have never worked so hard to just maintain our quality of life and property values,” she says. She spends her time going door-to-door informing renters in the nearby multi-family housing complexes and in a low-income trailer park. Most hadn’t even aware of the proposed project, since notification was only sent to the property owners and signs about the public meeting were placed on a street with restricted commercial access.

Ms. Feil explains that locals were assured that the drilling site would not be near them and would inconvenience them for just one month. That just isn’t the case. Even without accidents or groundwater contamination, fracking is disruptive to the local community.

Read the full post and sign a petition to help this neighborhood at Change.org.

***Much of this post is incited and informed by Russell Shorto’s excellent NYT Magazine article, “How Christian Were the Founders?” It is long, but well worth the read.***

There are times when we are reminded that even a single, small election can matter. No, this isn’t about Scott Brown. I am speaking of the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE). How many of you vote in your state’s BOE elections? Do you even remember? If it wasn’t on the straight party ticket I certainly didn’t. But these elections can have sweeping consequences, especially in Texas.

Before we move any further, it is important to highlight the significance of these decisions and the broader implications of the public school curriculum in Texas. With 4.7 million public school students, Texas is the second largest domestic market for textbooks. Because the largest, California, is so specific, Texas essentially determines what is or isn’t included in textbooks for the rest of the country. While publishers offer the decidedly weak defense that “It’s not a given that Texas’ curriculum translates into other states,” Professor James Kracht of Texas A&M, who has long been involved in the state’s textbook process, explains that “Texas governs 46 or 47 states.” So a perversion of Texas’ curriculum is a national problem.

This situation is not lost on the members of the Texas SBOE. In fact, for many, it’s the entire reason they’re there. 7 of the 15 members operate openly as a Christian conservative voting bloc and are quite frank about their objectives. This causes some tension with the rational world.

Mr. Shorto offers samples of this year’s controversies:

“McLeroy moved that Margaret Sanger, the birth-control pioneer, be included because she “and her followers promoted eugenics,” that language be inserted about Ronald Reagan’s “leadership in restoring national confidence” following Jimmy Carter’s presidency and that students be instructed to “describe the causes and key organizations and individuals of the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.” The injection of partisan politics into education went so far that at one point another Republican board member burst out in seemingly embarrassed exasperation, “Guys, you’re rewriting history now!” Nevertheless, most of McLeroy’s proposed amendments passed by a show of hands.”

and

“The board considered an amendment to require students to evaluate the contributions of significant Americans. The names proposed included Thurgood Marshall, Billy Graham, Newt Gingrich, William F. Buckley Jr., Hillary Rodham Clinton and Edward Kennedy. All passed muster except Kennedy, who was voted down.”

Many of you may remember the beloved children’s book “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?” Its author, Bill Martin Jr., was recently removed from the Texas 3rd grade social studies curriculum on account of un-American “critiques of capitalism and the American system.” The board members were concerned about a 2008 book entitled “Ethical Marxism” written by Bill Martin. A different Bill Martin. By the time their mistake was pointed out, the board members had already struck Bill Martin Jr. from the curriculum. This is a benign example of what happens when non-expert ideologues are allowed to decide what our kids should and shouldn’t learn.

The latest victim of McCarthyism. In textbooks for children no less.

Don McLeroy has long led this misguided charge, but he is not at all alone.

Another board member, Cynthia Dunbar, works at the new law school at Jerry Falwell’s conservative Liberty University. The school’s stated objective is “to transform legislatures, courts, commerce and civil government at all levels.” As a law professor, she teaches her students legal techniques to overturn rulings against conservative objectives such as prayer in schools. In her book “One Nation Under God,” Dunbar described her work on the SBOE as a “battle for our nation’s children and who will control their education and training” and described it as “crucial to our [Christians’] success for reclaiming our nation.”

Fortunately, these abuses have not gone unnoticed. Campaigns are in full swing ahead of the March 3rd election for these important positions, and Don McLeroy and his social conservative bloc have serious challengers running against them. But stakeholders on both sides of the aisle are mobilizing their supporters; conservatives only need to pick up one more reliable vote to gain complete control of the Board. Conservatives are typically much more active in small mid-term elections (which is how we found ourselves in this predicament to begin with), but rational people are fed up with these 7 zealots in unfortunate positions of outsized power. It is time to end this perversion of our nation’s public education, and on March 3rd, Texans will have their chance to do it.